Does anyone know of a program that has all the pre-sets to make PDFs for CreateSpace? Like you just fill in the prompts and pick your book size and it figures everything out about pages = so much spine etc and makes your PDF for you? Is there such a program/theme wizard or any thought to make one?

Sorry if I sound confused, tech-geekery is a bit beyond me at this time of night.

I have my own Pagemaker template, all I need to do is add the text and sort out where the page breaks should go. For the cover you can download an image that is the right size for the exact number of pages, but as long as you keep anything essential away from the edges it doesn't matter if you do it a bit too wide.

Does anyone know of a program that has all the pre-sets to make PDFs for CreateSpace? Like you just fill in the prompts and pick your book size and it figures everything out about pages = so much spine etc and makes your PDF for you? Is there such a program/theme wizard or any thought to make one?

Sorry if I sound confused, tech-geekery is a bit beyond me at this time of night.

I'm assuming you're talking about the cover since you refer to the spine.

I use one of their templates (The Palm 6 x 9) which allows me to use my own front and back cover and use Acorn for graphics (there are guidelines on their website for resolution, size, etc.) There's no need to work out the spine in that case as it's done for you, in a solid colour (which you can pick) and the title and author name on the spine in a font you can change.

I presume you mean the cover? I downloaded the template .png file, created the cover in Gimp, saved it as .tiff and used tiff2pdf to convert it into a .pdf file to upload... a convoluted process, but there was no need to wonder whether some random .pdf exporter would produce something usable.

I'm sure I have seen some cheap software on the web to create wrap-around covers at the right size, but then you're probably stuck with using a few specific templates that they provide.

Oh you mean cover... yea I just use their online tool for that. I build the front and back cover to the size they suggest (they have templates for that) in Photoshop (GiMP would work just as well) and then assemble it in their tool. Then I use their 3D preview to make sure i got it right. It seems to match reality very well.

I was hoping that maybe someone out there had created some all-in-one program I could use. Just plug my .doc in there, choose my output (6x9), then click where I want page numbers, etc. And based on the number of pages, it figures out the spine for the cover and I could just load whatever image into the preset template, and out would pop two PDFs I could load to CreateSpace.

As it is, I write in Scrivener and have to copy paste to get my text into LibreOffice, otherwise it gets rid of any spaces between paragraphs when I export :/ Then once in LibreOffice I start adding page numbers and stuff, but it does some weird thing there where I can export it as a PDF/A with header info, yet when I close the .doc file and come back later all the headers are gone So I basically have to do all my formatting at one time without closing the program and make my PDF there.

And for some reason, LibreOffice holds onto all these Converts, so I can't just be like "Select All" and change the font or add headers or whatever. Maybe I just need a better word processing program.

I'm also a terrible cover creator when it comes to figuring spines and everything, so I end up using CreateSpace's cover creator, but it doesn't give me a lot of freedom.